The bassoon is the oldest voice in this room. Not Rick Dilling, who has been playing these mountains for over fifty years. Not Steve Davidowski, who was making records with the Dixie Dregs before most of the cocktail menu's ingredients were invented. Not Zack Page, who has averaged 275 gigs a year for three decades and counting. The bassoon itself — an instrument whose lineage stretches back centuries, whose double reed carries the memory of court music and cathedral acoustics and the low murmur of orchestral pits — is the eldest presence on stage tonight. And Michael Rabinowitz, the only musician in jazz history to build an entire career around improvising on it, is the one who taught it to speak this language.
What makes this particular quartet so striking is not just the caliber of each player, though the combined résumé could fill a small library. It's the convergence of four musicians who each, in their own way, chose to step outside the expected frame. Rabinowitz walked away from the orchestral tradition to blow bebop through a double reed. Davidowski walked away from the Dixie Dregs at the height of their momentum to play saxophone and keyboards with Vassar Clements. Page has spent a lifetime refusing to choose between gypsy jazz and heavy metal, between cruise ships and mountain hollows. Dilling drove to North Carolina to play golf and accidentally became the rhythmic foundation of an entire region's jazz scene. None of them took the obvious path. All of them ended up here.
Rabinowitz brings his own compositions to the bandstand — music that moves with a composer's intention and an improviser's restlessness, shaped by decades inside the Charles Mingus Orchestra and collaborations with Wynton Marsalis, Joe Lovano, Chris Potter, and Anthony Braxton. Davidowski meets him there with the harmonic instincts of a musician who cut his teeth alongside Pat Metheny and Jaco Pastorius at the University of Miami and never stopped absorbing new vocabularies. Page and Dilling lock in underneath with the kind of telepathy that only comes from years of shared bandstands — Page building his architectural bass lines, Dilling doing what he has always done, which is make every musician around him sound like the best version of themselves.
This is a quartet assembled from four different compass points of American music — New York loft jazz, southern fusion, Appalachian roots, big band swing — meeting in a room on Broadway Street where the strange art watches and the cocktails are worth lingering over. The bassoon will fill the space the way it always does: with a sound that is simultaneously ancient and utterly new, comic and tender, deep enough to feel in your sternum. Free, as always, because that's how Monday nights work at Little Jumbo.
Featuring
You have almost certainly never heard a bassoon do what Michael Rabinowitz makes it do. Not because the instrument can't — it spans three octaves, drops below the baritone saxophone, climbs into tenor range, and its double reed can articulate with a staccato sharp enough to cut glass. But for most of the last century, the bassoon lived in orchestral chairs and film scores, waiting patiently for someone to ask it to improvise. Rabinowitz asked. He's been asking since the late seventies,...
In 1975, a group of students at the University of Miami School of Music — the same halls that produced Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, and Bruce Hornsby — recorded a demo album called The Great Spectacular and pressed a thousand copies. The keyboardist was Steve Davidowski. Two years later, on the strength of that tape and a tip from Allman Brothers keyboardist Chuck Leavell, Capricorn Records signed them. The album was Free Fall. The band was the Dixie Dregs. And the sound — an...
On their twelfth Christmas, Pete Page gave one son a guitar and the other a bass. The old man loved Booker T. & the M.G.'s and worshipped Duck Dunn, and he had a theory that every good band needs a good bass man. He wasn't wrong. Andy got the guitar. Zack — four minutes younger, identical in face, opposite in instrument — got the bass. Their mother came from the McGhees of Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, a family whose old-time music roots run back generations through the Appalachian soil....
Rick Dilling drove from Pennsylvania to the mountains of North Carolina in the summer of 1973 to play golf. He thought he wanted to be a teaching pro. That first week in Boone, a jazz pianist hired him for a gig, and he never went back home. More than fifty years later, he is still in these mountains, still playing, still the person every bandleader in western North Carolina calls first.
The origin story matters because it tells you something essential about how Dilling operates — he...